What am I going to do the rest of my life?

Or this summer, anyway…

Until just weeks ago, when I finished my undergraduate work at Albion College, I had no idea what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life. Not to mention what I’d be doing this summer.

All that changed the day I saw a posting on Internships.com for a social media internship at BookRenter.com. Since I was in the market for an internship and had an interest in social media marketing, I knew this would be a perfect opportunity. I also knew there’d be plenty of competition for the slot.

But I took a deep breath and applied for the internship anyway, via BookRenter’s Facebook page. Nice surprise: Within a few hours, I received an email asking for my resume and additional information. The next thing I knew, I was one of 10 finalists for the job. I learned from BookRenter that the company’s Facebook fans would determine, by popular vote, who would get the internship.

This was a brilliant idea – it would show just how creative and determined people were to win an internship. And to be totally honest, I loved it! I loved the competition and loved that it was online. As soon as the voting went live, I began hounding friends and family to vote for me. All that week, I was a man with a mission: everything revolved around getting more votes. By the end of the week, there were an awful lot of people hoping not to see my name on their caller ID, having wearied of repeated calls asking, “Did you vote for me? Did you? DID YOU?”

I suppose one reason that I was successful at getting votes was because of the variety of platforms I marketed on. On Facebook, I wrote on my friends’ walls and on group walls. I did direct messaging on Facebook and Twitter. I created an event on Facebook and invited people to it. I knew that even this might not be enough, so I decided to go above and beyond by creating a YouTube promo video for the contest. It turned out to be so popular that Google asked me if I wanted to use AdSense for the video. My voters even started the trend of writing Keith Kaplan promotion statuses – some of them very clever – on BookRenter’s wall.

After the week-long voting period, during which I checked votes approximately once a second, I came out on top and eventually was offered the internship. Now I still may not know what I’ll be doing for the rest of my life – though it looks like graduate school is next – but I do know what I’ll be doing this summer, and I am excited to see what my new internship will have to offer. Stay tuned!